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Wednesday, May 31, 2006

He believes the US government about Kennedy's murder and 9/11, says disbelief is "irrelevant" and "damaging".

He has lived in Israel, believes in Israel and now writes:

Although Hamas has not said so, it would come as no great surprise if Hamas were to agree that Jews may remain in scattered areas in the present Israel, while Palestine constructs huge settlement and infrastructure projects to take over the valuable land and resources, effectively breaking Israel up into unviable cantons, virtually separated from one another and from some small part of Jerusalem where Jews would also be allowed to remain. And they might agree to call the fragments "a state". If such proposals were made, we would - rightly - regard them as virtually a reversion to Nazism, a fact that might elicit some thoughts.

This nonsense is why Noam Chomsky is a certified Jewish genius and the best-known rebel in the Anglo-American media bubble - so dangerous he lectures at West Point.

Chomsky is a disinfo agent for the Guardian reader, a perfect adornment of the simulated Left and the Pretend-to Stop-the-War movement.

Aditjondro wrote, in October 2002, that Indonesia's military and business elites have very close ties to Israel and Mossad.

According to Aditjondro:

Indonesia, under Suharto, allowed Mossad to operate in Jakarta. The Indonesian military have cooperated with Mossad.

This was confirmed by former security chief General Soemitro in his biography.

The Indonesian army special force Kopassus has been equipped with Israeli Uzi guns.

These Uzi machine guns were reportedly used in the massacre of hundreds of Muslim activists in Tanjung Priok, Jakarta, on September 12, 1984, as well as in the assassination of the West Papuan artist and freedom fighter, Arnold Ap, on April 26, 1984 (Ramos-Horta, 1987: 148; Djopari, 1993: 129; Ramage, 1995: 37).

Kopassus admires the Israeli army. A Kopassus publication, on view to the media in 2000, includes a chapter praising the typical Israeli Army commander.

A number of hi-tech Israeli companies have had business deals with a number of well-known Indonesian companies. The Salim and Tamara Groups and the state-owned telecommunications company PT Telkom are among those which have business ties with Israel, indirectly. Through these companies, Indonesian plywood, fine quality textiles and electronics have gone to Israel (Indonesia Business Weekly , March 11, 1994: 20).

2. Indonesia/Timor controls the oil shipping lane from the Middle East to China/Japan.

3. The Indonesian military is seen as being an important ally in the attempt to contain China.

Why the World should care about East Timor:

1. With the approval of President Ford and Henry Kissinger, Indonesian invaded East Timor in 1975. That was when the genocide began and at least one third of the population died. In East Timor, Indonesia's Kopassus regiment, trained by the United States, used the tactics of the US Phoenix program in South Vietnam: systematic rapes, tortures and executions

2. The US government and its allies turned a blind eye to the terror in East Timor. When journalists spoke out, they were murdered and governments remained silent. (The Financial Times's Sander Thoenes, Australia's Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britain's Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie, New Zealand's Gary Cunningham. journalists: Western journalists murdered by Indonesian military ...). The generals responsible for the genocide in East Timor have escaped justice. Indonesia is now run by American trained General Yudhoyono, who was involved in East Timor.

3. When the Indonesian general's militias were massacring East Timorese in 1999, it was reportedly with the approval of the Pentagon.

Journalist Alan Nairn revealed that immediately after the vicious massacre of dozens of refugees seeking shelter in a church in Liquica, U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Dennis Blair assured Indonesian Army chief General Wiranto of US support and assistance, proposing a new U.S. training mission. East Timor

4. Dr Damien Kingsbury is head of philosophical, political and international studies at Deakin University. He wrote, 14 August 2003:

Kopassus still trains and organises the militias in West Timor that continue cross-border destabilisation operations into East Timor, according to a range of senior UN officials I spoke to there just weeks ago, and based on the Kopassus and militia members I saw in West Timor days later.

Who is behind the present turmoil in East Timor?

In March 2006, both Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair visited Indonesia.

In March 2006 , the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command stated in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he endorsed "a rapid, concerted infusion of assistance" for the Indonesian military. The Bush government proposed a six-fold increase in military aid to Indonesia.

In May 2006, the Indonesian military took part in the Cobra Gold regional military exercise with the United States and other countries.

THE villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.

Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”

The Abu Sifa deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.

The two incidents are being investigated by US authorities, but persistent eyewitness accounts of rampaging attacks by American troops are fuelling human rights activists’ concerns that Pentagon commanders are failing to curb military excesses in Iraq.

The Pentagon claims to have investigated at least 600 cases of alleged abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to have disciplined or punished 230 soldiers for improper behaviour. But a study by three New York-based human rights groups, due to be published next month, will claim that most soldiers found guilty of abuse received only “administrative” discipline such as loss of rank or pay, confinement to base or periods of extra duty.

People who have worked for the security services (CIA, Mossad, MI6 etc) may include:

Martin McGuinness of the IRA

Osama bin Laden

The 1980 Bologna bombers

and most of the brains behind most terror events in recent decades.

~~

Martin Ingram, a former British spy, unmasked the IRA's Freddie Scappaticci as a British spy two years ago.

On 28 May 2006, The Sunday World, a Dublin newspaper, quoted Martin Ingram, the pseudonym of a former member of the British Army’s Force Research Unit as saying: “McGuinness was working for MI6.”

Martin McGuinness is Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator and a former Provisional IRA chief-of-staff.

The newspaper's story is based on an alleged conversation between an MI6 spy and an agent known as “J118”. The conversation was about an imminent Provisional IRA attack. The MI6 agent encouraged his handler to “push this along as quickly as possible”. Six people died in the attack.

Mr Ingram told the Sunday World: “It has been confirmed to me that J118 is Martin McGuinness. The most significant thing for me . . . is the fact that McGuinness’s handler is the driving force behind the human bomb campaign.”

In April 2006, Denis Donaldson, a senior Sinn Fein member and convicted IRA bomber, was murdered in Co Donegal after admitting last year that he had worked as a spy for British Intelligence and Special Branch for more than 20 years.

On 25 May 2006, Britain's attorney-general, Lord GOLDSMITH, published further details about his advice on the legality of the Iraq war.

Reportedly Goldsmith changed his mind about the legality of the war between 7 March 2003 and 17 March 2003.

The 25 May 2006 statement published by Goldsmith says that in coming to his conclusions, he took account of information from then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the British Ambassador to the United Nations Sir Jeremy Greenstock.

One wonders if Goldsmith, Straw and Greenstock all have Jewish origins.

Matussek 'ranted about how the stoicism, education and humour of the British were being devalued by Big Brother, binge-drinking and happy-slapping.'

'Matussek’s love for Britain isn’t shared by all his countrymen. In a recent survey to find Germany’s favourite European neighbours, the British didn’t do terribly well. “The French came top,” says Matussek. Well, they have lovely scenery, which is why the Germans are all buying second homes in the Alsace. “England was between the Serbians and the Croatians – No 29 or something.”'

3. It has trained, equipped and led militias in East Timor, West Papua and Aceh.

4. Kopassus members trained the notorious Laskar Jihad Islamic militia, which stepped up conflict in the Ambon region, leaving up to 10,000 dead.

5. It was Kopassus that murdered Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay in 2001, and who Indonesian police say killed three teachers (two of whom were American)

6. Kopassus still trains and organises the militias in West Timor that continue cross-border destabilisation operations into East Timor. It is because of these cross-border raids that the Australian army has extended its stay in East Timor.

Helping with the relief efforts in Jogjakarta is the Indonesian Red Cross, which is associated with a lady called Tutut, daughter of Suharto.

Tutut is allegedly corrupt. Her brother is in jail for the murder of a judge.

There have been allegations that former president Soeharto's daughter, Siti "Tutut" Hardiyanti Rukmana, received US$31 million in bribes from a British arms company to sell tanks to Indonesia a decade ago.

Sutowo was allowed to quietly retire from Pertamina and he became head of the Red Cross in Indonesia. A member of the Sutowo family, Adiguna Sutowo, was recently arrested for the murder of a waiter in the Jakarta Hilton, which is owned by the Sutowo family.

Red Cross hospitals in Indonesia are some times run by former members of the corrupt military.

It is not unknown to find that Red Cross hospitals in Indonesia are less than clean and less than well equipped.

Reportedly, it is not unknown to find in Red Cross hospitals in Indonesia that children die because they are not getting any medicines.

The Indonesian military was put into power, and is kept in power, by the USA.

Indonesia's President Yudhoyono is a former Suharto general and has always been a friend of the Pentagon. He was involved in the conflict in East Timor.

In the Philippines there continue to be assasinations and disappearances of those who oppose the right-wing, pro-Pentagon government.

In 2004, 63 were killed.

In 2005, 179 were assassinated and another 46 disappeared and presumed dead.

So far in the first two months of 2006 there have been 26 documented political assassinations....

Ramsey Clark investigated death squads.

Clark wrote that "the victims of vigilante violence are overwhelmingly poor farmers, workers, slum dwellers, and others who are pushing for significant land reform, wage increases and protection workers' rights, as well as those who oppose U.S. military bases."

The increase in death squad activities in the Philippines comes at the same time as increased CIA aid and was preceded by a visit to the Philippines by Maj. Gen. John Singlaub. (The Nation, 9/19/1987)

The following are extracts from an article in the May 19, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

An Arroyo-Bush military pact sealed in 2001 has secured millions in US military aid to the Arroyo dictatorship, the largest recipient of US aid in the Asia-Pacific region. There are currently thousands of US military in the Philippines training Philippine forces in suppression tactics that include large-scale political persecution, under the auspices of so-called anti-terrorism measures.

Since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo joined the US global "War on Terrorism", the Philippines has become the site of an on-going undeclared war against peasant and union activists, progressive political dissidents and lawmakers, human rights lawyers and activists, women leaders and a wide range of print and broadcast journalists. Because of the links between the Army, the regime and the death squads, political assassinations take place in an atmosphere of absolute impunity. The vast majority of the attacks occur in the countryside and provincial towns... Between 2001 and 2006 hundreds of killings, disappearances, death threats and cases of torture have been documented by the independent human rights center, KARAPATAN , and the church-linked Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research. Since Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001 there have been 400 documented extrajudicial killings. In 2004, 63 were killed and in 2005, 179 were assassinated and another 46 disappeared and presumed dead.So far in the first two months of 2006 there have been 26 documented political assassinations....In the years following the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship (Feb. 26, 1986) by a military and Church-backed revolt, the subsequent elected presidents have failed to stem the ongoing deterioration of the country. The new rulers like Corazon Aquino (1986-1992), and former General Fidel Ramos (1992-1998), simply favored a new set of oligarchs and set the stage for the rise to power of a corrupt populist, Joseph Estrada. His "anti-oligarch" rhetoric brought him to the presidential palace in 1998 with widespread support among the poor. Estrada became an irritant to Washington and the traditional oligarchy by welcoming Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 1999 and for his populist social policies, such as handing out thousands of land titles to urban squatters.US-designed, upper class-backed, street demonstrations supported by sectors of the military elite culminated in the ouster of Estrada in January 2001. The same forces hoisted his Vice President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to the Presidency. Macapagal is a US educated, neo-liberal economist and favorite of the US Embassy.

This political putsch led to the expansion of US military basing rights and a new military agreement, quickly signed by Macapagal after a two year delay during Estrada's presidency. With the rise of Macapagal-Arroyo, Washington has a reliable client.The newly 'installed' Macapagal Arroyo quickly instituted a neo-liberal program of privatizations, drastic cuts for public education and public hospitals and onerous value-added taxes which impacted the poor and lower middle-class.

By 2005, the Philippine total external and internal debt ballooned to over $100 billion dollars and yearly debt servicing exceed 30 per cent of the budget.

Even 8 million overseas Filipino workers (including a significant section of the educated professionals) sending home $12.5 billion dollars of remittances in 2005 could not begin to cover debt servicing.

The Philippines bears the dubious distinction of being the only country in Asia to have seen a drop in per capita GDP during and since the heady years of the 'Asian Tiger' boom.

Macapagal Arroyo's family and cronies have been implicated in the same levels of corruption as that attributed to the deposed President Estrada... ~~

The terrorists who carried out last month's triple bomb blasts in the Sinai resort town of Dahab used Israeli cell phones as their primary method of communication, according to security officials close to the investigation...

Twenty-four people were killed and more than 85 were injured last month in the bomb attacks, which ripped through a Dahab restaurant, cafe and shopping center...

Sources close to the investigation said the Egyptian terror cell communicated with each other using Israeli cell phones. They said an Israeli cell phone chip was found on Mounir Muhareb, a suspected plotter of the attack who was killed in clashes with Egyptian forces earlier this month...

The Egyptian officials have requested the Hamas-led Palestinian government arrest and turn over a wanted militant

Abu Abir, spokesperson for the Popular Resistance Committees, said he was aware of the Egyptian request but denied his group was harboring anyone associated with the Dahab bombings.

It's a familiar image: the U.S. president followed by an aide with the "football," the ever-present attache case that holds the codes for launching a nuclear attack.

But for years, these supposedly supreme commanders-in-chief did not have the slightest idea which targets would actually be hit at their order.

This occult knowledge was reserved for a small circle of Pentagon officers who called themselves the "guardians of the arsenal" and kept the true attack plans secret from the civilian leadership.

The first civilian to see the plans, during the Kennedy administration, was, ironically enough, Daniel Ellsberg -- the Pentagon consultant who later leaked the "Pentagon Papers," revealing the disastrous lies behind America's war in Vietnam.

What Ellsberg found was moral insanity almost beyond imagining.

The only plan proposed by the "guardians" was an all-out nuclear strike on every city in the Soviet Union, as well as on China and the Warsaw Pact nations, with a deliberately low-balled estimate of 400 million people killed immediately.

There were "no intermediate steps, no flexibility and no warnings" incorporated in the plan, which could be triggered by a range of non-nuclear provocations, some posing no direct threat to the United States at all.

What's more, the high priest of the nuclear cult, General Curtis LeMay, reserved the right to launch this genocidal fury on his own, as a first strike, if he suspected the Soviets were preparing to attack.

Civilian control of the military was thus exposed as an empty myth; the center of power in the U.S. government had shifted from the decisions of democratically elected leaders to the imperatives of procurement and militarist paranoia emanating from the five-sided fortress raised up in a Virginia wasteland known as Hell's Bottom.

This is just one of the many chilling stories recounted in James Carroll's important new book, "House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power."

Carroll, an acclaimed novelist -- and son of a top Pentagon official -- provides a devastating inside history of the military state-within-a-state that usurped the Republic and now reigns unchallenged in Washington.

It is a grim and dispiriting tale indeed. For more than 60 years, the vast, institutional engines of the Pentagon have permeated and skewed U.S. society toward a harsh, fearful and fearsome militarism.

In almost every case, the inhuman scale of this gargantuan war machine has infected those who sought to master it. Even the officers and officials who entered its service with the best intentions -- and Carroll provides many such instances -- were inexorably driven toward the worst instincts of our human nature by the blood-and-iron logic of a system based ultimately on violence, terror and the world-murdering power of nuclear weapons.

Opened in January 1943 as a supposedly temporary concentration of military bureaucracies, the Pentagon quickly became the locus of the inevitably brutalizing effect of war, now magnified a thousandfold by the new technologies of mass destruction, especially air power.

Although U.S. commanders at first denounced the British practice of "terror bombing" civilians in enemy countries, by 1945 they had embraced it with a vengeance.

LeMay, with his young, number-crunching assistant, Robert McNamara, directed a firebombing campaign against Japanese cities that killed 900,000 civilians in just a few weeks.

With this level of civilian slaughter already accepted as deliberate policy, it was hardly a great moral leap to cross the nuclear threshold against Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- or, later, to plan for killing 400 million people at a single stroke.

This savage ethos, forged in the dehumanizing crucible of total war, has prevailed against all the many attempts to change it.

Even Ellsberg's discovery did little to return the Pentagon, and the nuclear arsenal, to civilian control.

The "whiz kid" McNamara, who by then had become Pentagon chief, demanded a more "humane" attack strategy. But his call for greater precision in targeting required a whole new generation of deadlier, more sophisticated weapons.

The Soviets, who had only four -- four! -- intercontinental missiles when Kennedy took office, felt pressured to respond in kind to the sudden U.S. buildup. This in turn fueled more "countermeasures" by the Pentagon and its procurement partners. Far from easing tensions, the world moved even closer to nuclear conflagration.

The end of the Cold War made no difference to the Pentagon's corrupting dominance of U.S. policy.

The expected "peace dividend" following the Soviet collapse never materialized; the Pentagon simply found new enemies to stir the same public fears and feed its own paranoia: Saddam Hussein, "rogue states," Islamic extremism.

Today, with the never-ending "war on terror," the Pentagon has completely devoured the state, bending the entire government to its will and commanding limitless sources of corporate patronage and political muscle.

The Bush regime has unleashed the "nuclear priesthood," discarding arms-control treaties, building a new generation of deadlier nukes and once more pressuring Russia, still in the crosshairs of thousands of U.S. warheads, to respond with a new arms race.

Thus we come to the bitter irony at the heart of the story: the Pentagon ethos -- which enthrones "national security" as a supreme value for which the "guardians" are willing to sacrifice millions of innocent lives, the nation's civil liberties, even the planet itself -- has, at every turn, only made America less secure.

This brief look at Carroll's masterful, multilayered history hardly does the book justice. It should be read in full by anyone who wants to understand how America has reached its present degraded condition -- and how daunting the prospects are for real change in the crippling militarism that holds the nation in thrall.

“It’s worth remembering that in 1920, Australian strategic planners were worried about Japan trying to get its hands on the rumoured oil resources of Portuguese Timor, but in 1975 there were fears that China would manipulate a leftish independent Timor for territorial advantage.”

Indonesia, Australia, China and Japan are among the countries interested in East Timor's oil.

~

Kopassus is Indonesia's 'Gestapo regiment'. It's generals have close links to the Pentagon.

Dr Damien Kingsbury is head of philosophical, political and international studies at Deakin University. He wrote, 14 August 2003:

Kopassus still trains and organises the militias in West Timor that continue cross-border destabilisation operations into East Timor, according to a range of senior UN officials I spoke to there just weeks ago, and based on the Kopassus and militia members I saw in West Timor days later. It is because of these cross-border raids that the Australian army has extended its stay in East Timor.

East Timor has oil.

West Timor is part of Indonesia.

A few years ago Indonesia was kicked out of East Timor.

Someone seems to be stirring up trouble in East Timor.

The Prime Minister of East Timor claims that the gang violence (May 2006) is part of an attempted coup.

"What is in motion is an attempt to stage a coup d'etat. However, I am confident that the president of the republic, with whom I am keeping permanent contacts, will not cease to respect the constitution of the democratic republic of Timor Leste."

He said the violence was politically not ethnically motivated despite reports of people from east and west of East Timor attacking one another.

The mayhem, he said, "stemmed from the planned and opportunistic action of gangs", but he did not know who was behind it.

A political struggle between President Xanana Gusmao and Alkatiri has helped fuel tensions within the country as well as its bitterly divided security forces and communal groups.

A spokesman for Alkatiri told AAP that the prime minister was working with the president to solve the crisis.

Alkatiri also talked of a coup attempt earlier this week after fighting in military ranks first erupted.

This month Alkatiri put down an attempt to unseat him as head of the governing Fretilin party.This evening Australian soldiers stopped mobs of machete-wielding men from charging a Dili hotel where the prime minister was about to hold his news conference.

LONDON – Gen. Michael Hayden, the new head of the CIA and the former chief of the National Security Agency who is due in London at the end of the month for a meet-and-greet visit with Britain's intelligence chiefs, will face some tough questions from Lord Stevens, the former head of Scotland Yard.

Known as "The Grand Inquisitor," Stevens is leading the long-running investigation into the deaths of Princess Diana and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed.

Stevens already has conducted lengthy interviews with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5; Sir John Scarlett, director-general of MI6; and his predecessor, Sir Richard Dearlove. They have all handed over secret files on the deaths.

But intelligence sources in London and Washington have confirmed it is the potentially explosive evidence that NSA holds which could send the Stevens inquiry deep into what one source called "where Royal glitz met the underbelly of intelligence."

The NSA has admitted it holds 1,050 documents – transcripts of its satellite surveillance on Diana during the last weeks of her life. Until now NSA has insisted it cannot release the transcripts because "they raise issues of national security."

A year before her death, Diana publicly claimed on BBC television she was "under surveillance by the intelligence world."

She insisted this was because of her campaign against landmines – which had aroused opposition in Britain and America from armaments manufacturers. All produce large quantities of landmines.

NSA director and America's most senior intelligence officer, Hayden, had ordered the documents must remain secretly stored in the sprawling Fort George Meade complex outside Washington.

But when he comes to London, Hayden will not have the protection of diplomatic immunity – his job does not carry such protection.

A source close to the Stevens inquiry team said: "He can be questioned like any relevant witness."

The NSA tapes have been rumoured to finally confirm – or deny – that Diana was pregnant by Dodi al-Fayed when she died.

Ari Ben-Menashe, a former adviser on national security to the Israeli government, has claimed the NSA transcripts "contain answers to show what happened in the days before Diana died. They will confirm what Prince Charles has been told – that he should expect shocking revelations about her death."

Ben-Menashe also confirmed that Mossad, the intelligence service once "tasked for delicate missions," has files on Diana and Dodi's deaths.

Now a political consultant in Montreal, Canada, Ben-Menashe claimed he tried to "broker a deal" with Dodi's father, Mohammed al-Fayed, the millionaire head of Harrods.

"We couldn't agree on my fees for investigating what the documents contained," said Ben-Menashe. His clients have included Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe.

While no formal request to provide its files has been received from the Stevens inquiry, a senior Mossad officer close to its own director, Meir Dagan, said: "Our interest was not in Diana but in Henri Paul. We knew he was already working for French intelligence in his capacity as head of security of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. We knew the hotel, owned by Dodi's father, was being widely used by arms dealers supplying weapons to attack Israel. We were still trying to persuade Henri Paul to work with us when he died."